| maurizio
bolognini |
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Since the 1980s Maurizio Bolognini's works have been exploring the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, and during that time have investigated various dimensions: delegating to machines certain creative functions; generating out-of-control infinities (endless images, inexhaustible voices); the introduction of advanced forms of interactivity, networking and e-democracy; the space-time flows of technological communication, and the interplay of geographical and electronic space. In 1988, he began to use computers to produce endless streams of images. In the 1990s, he programmed hundreds of machines to generate continuously expanding images and then left them to run indefinitely and without monitors (this work has been exhibited widely in Europe and the U.S.). Since 2000 his work has focused on the possibilities of generative, interactive and public art, in the form of installations which connect some of his Programmed Machines to the mobile phone network, allowing anyone to modify the process of image generation from their own cell phone. |
Il lavoro di Maurizio Bolognini esplora le implicazioni sociali e culturali delle nuove tecnologie dagli anni '80, indagando dimensioni diverse: la delega alla macchina di alcune funzioni creative, la generazione di infinità fuori controllo (immagini sconfinate, voci inesauribili), l'introduzione di forme avanzate di interazione del pubblico, il networking e l'e-democracy, i flussi spazio-temporali della comunicazione tecnologica e le interferenze tra spazio geografico e spazio elettronico... Nel 1988 inizia a usare computer per produrre flussi di immagini inesauribili. Negli anni '90 programma centinaia di macchine che generano immagini in continua espansione, lasciandole funzionare all’infinito e senza monitor (un lavoro esposto in numerose occasioni, in Europa e negli Stati Uniti). Dal 2000 il suo lavoro si concentra sulla possibilità di un'arte generativa, interattiva e pubblica, con installazioni che collegano alcune delle sue Macchine programmate alla rete telefonica mobile, consentendo a chiunque di modificare, dal proprio telefono cellulare, il processo di generazione delle immagini. |
| These images are part of a continuous, interactive flow of images, which hundreds of machines have been generating for twenty years now. |
Interactive installation (Art Palace, Cairo, 2008)
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Installation
of Programmed Machines |
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Twenty
years ago Bolognini began using computers to generate a flow of continuously expanding random images
(Programmed Machines series).
In the 1990s he programmed hundreds of these computers and left them to run ad
infinitum. Most of these are still working (with or without a screen, with or without audience
interactivity).
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"The project series Sealed Computers by Maurizio Bolognini point us to what might form the most significant line of force in the field of software-based
art......"
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Installation
of Programmed Machines Installation
of Programmed Machines
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About his Programmed Machines Bolognini
wrote: "I do not consider myself an
artist who creates certain images, and I am not merely a conceptual artist. I am one whose machines have actually traced more lines than anyone else, covering boundless
surfaces. I am not interested in the quality of the images produced by my installations but rather in their
flow, their limitlessness in space and time, and the possibility of creating parallel universes of information made up of kilometres of images and infinite
trajectories. My installations serve to generate out-of-control infinities......"
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Installation
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"Maurizio Bolognini’s work is located in the narrow edge zone that separates the subject’s acceptance of, and surrender to, the preponderance of technology, from the residual determination to strive against it, which remains after all jubilatory human-centric self-illusion has been laid aside [...]. He is in perfect harmony with all our work on the aesthetics of communication and the technological sublime......" Mario Costa |
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"I must say that my first
reading of his work, decidedly atypical compared to the rich bibliography
about him, continues to seem to me to be a possible reading, which in some
way disregards the position of Bolognini in the constellation of Technological
Artists, and brings him back into what is for me the more familiar field
of conceptual research and to one of the central themes of Conceptual Art,
that of reflection on the great categories of existence, the coordinates
of space and time. From Manzoni’s Linea
Infinita to On
Kawara’s One Million Years, from Anselmo’s Infinito […], the attempts
to arrest in an image or in an idea the elusive dimension of space (and
thus of time) is a
thread running through the artistic research of the latter half of the
twentieth century which, in these and other artists, makes use of the
categories of the metaphor and the symbol. Maurizio Bolognini’s out-of-control
infinities located (provisionally) at the end of this path, where there is a movement
[…] from the virtuality of the idea to a reality where
space and time are truly (although only potentially) infinite......." Sandra Solimano |
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"Maurizio Bolognini - perhaps
sub-conciously - must have some unfinished business with the Irish bishop
George Berkeley (1685-1753), who maintained that esse
est percipi et percipere,
that is to say 'to be is to be perceived and to perceive'. His Sealed
Computers will function over a long period of time, but the public eye will only perceive
the machine and not the product. […] What allowed a leeway of meaning in
what would otherwise be merely a 'manipulation' of signs was the
ability to interpret data and results in a geometric context, where with
senses like vision and touch, the 'doors of perception', concepts and
formulae could be rendered spatially.
It was this type of hermeneutics which Berkeley saw as the only way in
which the work of a mathematician could be distinguished from that of a
simple conjurer and his tricks. But it is this same coupling that here contemporary art
is trying to break. The sign forgets, as it were,
any established reference......." Giulio Giorello |
Installation of Programmed Machines (CACTicino, Switzerland, 2003) |
"Museophagia, the name says it all, means the tendency or habit of eating
museums. It is something that the Internet is beginning to do right now, or at least it is taking
nibbles. The first evidence of museophagia, in fact a kind of digital bulimia, was the attempt of Bill
Gates, through a company called Corbys, to gobble up by fact of digitization and scanning all the contents of museums and galleries that Corbys deemed
fit, to regurgitate them on line, at a cost, of course, via proprietary channels. "When I stand before a work by Maurizio Bolognini I feel: [...] contrary to the conviction of what one would call the de-subjectivised, de-passionalised ambit of this post-electronic age, I feel. I see as in a flash the gesture carried out around that time of showing the unshowable, as in the exhibitions le vide and le plein held in Paris at the Gallerie Iris Clert by artists who still thought that the product and not the concept represented the great future challenge. [...] Bolognini, on the other hand, who also thinks of the present world - techno-productive, hard and soft - works at a "decisional" level. He is "political". He handles machines, software, contexts, constituting a paradoxical pattern of "modes of use", and only at the end (at the end of the decision and once the action has been made) will he perhaps clarify or give a glimpse of the non-sense that belongs as much to the work as to the appointed place........" Simonetta Lux |
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"Works such as Altavista, Antipodes, and Stanza 11 explore the space-time
flows of technological processes, and the interplay of geographical and electronic
space......."
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Altavista (Artmedia VI, 1996)
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